A social networking service is an online service that focuses on building social networks and/or relationships among people who share interests. A user of a social network service may be able to create a profile that lists, for example, information about the user as well as social links (e.g., friends of the user). For example, the user may post ideas, activities, events, interests, and contact information on their user profile. The user may be able to upload pictures to their profile, post blog entries, search for other users, and/or store a list of contacts.
The social networking service may also facilitate communication between users over the Internet through e-mail and/or instant messaging, for example. The user profile may include a section for other users to leave comments and upload other content. The social networking service may include forums, where the user may communicate with other users. The user may be able to create and/or subscribe to groups that share common interests or affiliations, and the user may be able to send or receive comments and other content to or from the other group members. The social networking service may provide controls that allow the user to determine which other users may view the user profile or contact the user, and to which users profile changes or updates are reported or pushed.
Facebook is an example of a widely used social networking service. A Facebook user creates a profile for other users to view. The user may add other users as friends, and these friends may be automatically notified when the user updates his or her profile. For example, the friends of the user may be notified when, for example, the user uploads new pictures or changes his or her status to “at work.” The Facebook user may set one or more parts of the profile to “public” (e.g., all Facebook user may view the one or more parts of the profile), and may set parts of the profile to “private” (e.g., only friends may view the one or more parts of the profile).
Twitter is another example of a widely used social networking service. A Twitter user may send and receive text-based posts of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets.” The user may subscribe to other users' tweets, and other users may subscribe to the user's tweets (e.g., followers). Tweets are public by default, but the user may restrict messages to be private such that only followers of the user may see the tweet. Due to the content limit (e.g., up to 140 characters), tweets may direct followers to content-hosting services such as, for example, Twitpic to accommodate multimedia content and text longer than 140 characters.
Generally, social networks, as described above, have been marketed towards individual users and deployed so as to be publicly available to the general population of Internet users for their private use. Accordingly, the implementations of these social networks have had to account for privacy concerns, data ownership concerns, etc. and are subject to both public and regulatory scrutiny.